‘Where are you from?’

‘Where are you from?’

By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

NEW DELHI:

It seems an innocuous enough question, but it’s one that brings me to a grinding halt.

Then I usually take a deep breath and launch into my speech: « Well, I was born in Bombay, but my parents come from South India. We moved to Canada when I was seven. After university, I’ve lived and worked in Canada, England, Holland, Portugal and India. »

Sometimes I wish I could give a one-word answer, but I feel it just would not adequately describe me. And maybe in today’s world of high mobility, varied interests and greater accessibility, it doesn’t describe a number of us anymore.

I’ve absorbed some things from each place where I’ve lived, and therefore am definitely a composite. In school, we used the term « cultural mosaic » to describe Canada, and I feel I’m that, all by myself. It sounds better than « schizophrenic. »

Being a cultural mosaic can lead to a sense of uprootedness. I feel I’m a visitor everywhere, always a bit removed from any situation I find myself in.

Sometimes when I visit friends who have lived in one place their entire lives, I sense a stability and continuity that I can only envy. They don’t need to figure out which doctor to call, nor look up words in a foreign-language dictionary to describe a particularly embarrassing condition. They don’t need to find out where to buy fresh fish, or what is a good price to pay.

They don’t have to repeatedly answer questions like, « Where are you from? »

When you find yourself doing these things again and again over the years in different countries, you have to ask yourself, « Am I making progress? » While my friends are moving upwards in their lives, am I simply moving horizontally?

In Portugal, they have a name for us: estrangeiros. Describing expats (including himself) in his book « Imaginary Homelands, » Salman Rushdie wrote: « Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. »

Physical movement can lead to an intellectual movement as well. Edward Said, in a lecture titled « Intellectual Exile, » called us « marginals. » But he also listed three positive aspects of the condition:

We never see things in isolation, always through a double perspective, « in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, » and therefore we derive our own interpretations of them.

We « look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, » as the result of choices we’ve made.

We have the opportunity to begin afresh in each new situation, and perhaps even to do things that we would not or could not have done in our earlier locale.

Call us what you will – global nomads, gypsies, citizens of the world – we are better understood now, or at least better tolerated, and not least because we’ve increased in number.

During my first stay in India in the early 1990s, people used to wonder why I, looking obviously Indian, should talk with a strange accent.

There was a term then that was supposed to described me: ABCDs – American-Born Confused Desi (Indian). It served as a good catch-all phrase for those who didn’t care to know the details.

I don’t hear that term anymore. Many families have a son or daughter living abroad and parents who visit them yearly. And when they hear me speak, they wonder what part of North America I’m from.

When I tell them I grew up in Calgary, they ask if I’ve met their aunt’s son-in-law’s sister’s friend. There are also many Indians who were born abroad or had immigrated who are now returning to work in India. What will be the acronym for them? Maybe we don’t need one any more.

Nowadays even my accent doesn’t stand out anymore. When Madhuri Dixit and others who’ve been in North America for only a couple of years return with a much stronger twang than I have, people wonder why I don’t sound, look and act more . . . North American.

As movement becomes more the norm, our countries – whether they be those of our parents, of our birth, of our upbringing, or of our current residence – may no longer define us.

Maybe then the question will not be « where are you from? » but rather « where are you going? » Quo vadis?

Ranjani Iyer Mohanty, a writer, editor and cultural mosaic, currently lives in New Delhi.

Karim Emile Bitar graduated from France’s National School of Administration (ENA 1997-1999) and from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). He also studied Law at the University of Paris Sorbonne and obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and International Relations from McGill University. He spent his senior year at Harvard where he studied Government and specialized in Middle East Studies.

He is president of KB Consulting Group (management, communication and public affairs consultancy) and editor of French monthly magazine L’ENA hors les murs. He teaches international relations, political philosophy and management at various institutions and business schools.

He joined the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) as an associate fellow in March 2008.

Between 2000 and 2004, he worked at France’s television channel CANAL + (Vivendi Universal) as a project leader in charge of strategic planning, business development and external relations.

He edited and co-wrote the collective book Regards sur la France (Seuil, 2007, 640 pages), in which thirty personalities from across the world (former heads of state, intellectuals, political scientists, economists, artists and heads of multinational firms) analyzed France’s strengths and weaknesses.

Karim Bitar was born on September 25, 1972, in Beirut, Lebanon, the son of former minister Dr Emile Bitar. He holds Lebanese, French and Canadian citizenship and is fluent in French, Arabic and English.